At the October 13 governor’s debate, Bruce Blakeman asked Kathy Hochul to apologize to victims of crimes he tied to immigrants in the country illegally. Fox News headlined that she “dodges”; its own story quotes her apology. ‘Dodges’ is the verdict, delivered before the reader reaches the answer. Fox’s own first paragraph says Hochul ‘declined to directly apologize’; its 12th paragraph quotes her: ‘I apologize for any pain that has happened to anyone.’ A reader may find that vague or enough. The headline makes the choice in one verb. The tell is a verb that grades an answer in a headline that never quotes the answer. ‘Illegal immigrant crime’ is the hard word: the legal question of a person’s status welded to a violent act, so the crime seems to belong to the status. It rides a habit of the mind: a stranger’s crime reads as his kind, while our own side’s reads as circumstance. The one case Fox names is a charge. Jose Medina-Medina ‘faces charges’ in the shooting of Sheridan Gorman, 18, near Loyola’s Chicago campus. The page’s description says families of people killed in New York. Blakeman spent his only cross-examination question on these crimes, amNewYork reports. Other write-ups heard a contest: Breitbart’s ‘Battle over Immigration’, CBS New York’s ‘clash’. Gothamist saw no major gaffes or viral moments. Fox’s page has one, and its ‘critics’ are five X posts from the RNC and conservative media, with no reply from Hochul’s side. The verb works for the candidate trailing by 9 to 19 points, 19 days out. Hochul’s own line, ICE ‘terrorizing our neighborhoods’, gets the same knife.
